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Last month, Donald Trump was once again sworn in as President of the United States. That same day, the head of the organization responsible for the standards and safety of planes and air traffic control in the United States stepped down. On January 30 of this year, a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet, resulting in the deaths of 67 people. It was the worst aviation disaster in the United States since 2001.
Coincidence? Yes. I mean, let’s just get that out of the way right now: that horrific accident did not occur because of Donald Trump taking office. Nor did it occur because of the existence of black, female, or disabled people like Trump and his drooling moron cult members claimed, obviously.
But what about all those other plane crashes you heard about after the DC collision? Why are airplanes dropping out of the sky at an unprecedented rate so soon after Trump’s inauguration?
It turns out that there are approximately three airplane accidents every day. You don’t hear about them until there’s one where a lot of people die, and then in the days and weeks after that you get to hear about even the minor ones, because news corporations know that you’ll tune in while airplane accidents are hot news.
It’s exactly what happened in the days following the train derailment in East Palestine in 2023: for a few weeks, it was just nonstop train news. But just as suddenly, train news went away. In another week, you’ll probably stop hearing about plane crashes.
All that said, there IS something to be worried about when it comes to the root cause of these various plane crashes, and it’s the same something that was behind that train derailment: deregulation.
In much the same way that we cannot state with certainty that any single hurricane or wildfire is wholly due to climate change, we cannot state with certainty that any single major accident in any industry is wholly due to deregulation. But in both cases, we CAN state that this is the sort of tragedy that scientists warned would become increasingly common due to those factors.
Trump did not invent deregulation—he is merely the vessel through which the far right finally achieve their wildest dreams, first put into motion in the middle of the 20th century. It was Jimmy Carter, surprisingly, who fell for the bullshit spread by Reagan’s economic advisors and deregulated the airline industry, leading to a slight drop in prices for consumers, accompanied by a massive drop in the quality of air travel: more delays, more lost luggage, less room, shittier snacks, and more customer complaints have made it so that even former CEOs like Robert Crandall have called for re-regulation, saying that “experience has established that market forces alone cannot and will not produce a satisfactory airline industry, which clearly needs some help to solve its pricing, cost, and operating problems.”
Deregulation was even worse for employees, who now get paid less for doing more work, as airlines have continued to reduce their workforce even after getting government bailouts.
But the worst possible result of deregulation has been safety. Yes, air travel is far safer than driving. Yes, overall, air travel has become safer over the past few decades. But for many years now, insiders have been warning about how deregulation is increasing risk overall, as back in 1996 when two major plane crashes led experts to point out that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had failed consumers, as the deregulation defanged them, made them unable to keep up with the explosion of new low cost carriers and increased air traffic, and led them to prioritize promoting air travel instead of regulating safety.
Or in 2008, when one industry expert pointed out the problem of airlines saving money by outsourcing their mechanical needs: “a mad race to the bottom on maintenance costs,” benefiting shareholders but putting everyone else at risk.
In late 2018 and early 2019, Boeing’s 737 Max was involved in two major fatal accidents, killing more than 300 people. A weak, underfunded, understaffed, and leaderless FAA under Trump was the last major authority in the world to agree to ground the planes.
And now here we are in 2025, when the sadistic shareholders finally have their useful idiot back in office, and this time they were actually ready. Having paid for the president himself, Elon Musk has dealt extra damage to the FAA by calling for and then getting the resignation of it’s head, Michael Whitaker.
Snopes would like you to know that there is NO evidence that Musk pushed Whitaker to resign, which is true so long as you don’t consider circumstantial evidence to be evidence. Here is that non-evidential evidence:
Last September, the FAA proposed fining Musk’s company, SpaceX, more than $600,000 for flagrantly ignoring certain safety requirements before two separate launches in 2023. Musk scrambled to Xitter and called for Whitaker to resign, while also accusing the FAA of bullying him and insisting the organization shouldn’t even exist.
The following month, Elon Musk paid for Donald Trump to win the presidency. A few weeks later, Whitaker announced his intention to resign, despite the fact that he was only one year into a four-year term. He resigned on the same day as Trump’s inauguration.
But no, I’m sure this has nothing to do with Elon Musk.
In addition to making the FAA once again rudderless, President Musk…I’m sorry, I mean President Trump eliminated all members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a group that was established all the way back in 1989 in response to the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, known as the Lockerbie bombing. Their job for 35 years was to research and recommend policies and programs that would improve airline safety, and 95% of their recommendations have been instituted. The elimination of this committee’s members has led the President of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 to release a statement saying that this action “will undermine aviation security in the United States and across the globe.”
And somehow, I bet I’ll still be delayed twenty minutes by TSA because I forgot to empty my water bottle.
So yeah, that’s where we are right now: decades of deregulation have led us to a moment when a billionaire can snap his fingers and eliminate the last vestiges of oversight that were attempting to keep us safe, not just while we are riding in airplanes, but also in our own homes, since this man is in charge of launching rocket ships into the atmosphere.
The irony here is that SpaceX only exists because the US government decided that it was too dangerous to offload all our space technology onto two large corporations, so they created a program that awarded large contracts to smaller venders, which rescued SpaceX from the brink of bankruptcy. Oh wait, that’s not irony, it’s just the way that things work: billionaires become billionaires by stealing public funds for projects that produce profits that are then privatized. And now Musk is so rich that he can pull the ladder up behind him and do away with even these small annoyances that cost him extra time and money and make the rest of us safer. Those little “t”s he still has to cross, and “i”s he has to dot, that do nothing for Elon Musk but prevent our water from being poisoned and our houses from being destroyed by space junk. And it’s all thanks to decades of rightwing mythology that convinced Americans that we need private industry to achieve greatness. In fact, all private industry will do is make more money for private industry, and they don’t care if they take your life along with your money.
So no, the sudden increase in news about airplane accidents isn’t due to Trump and Elon Musk taking office last month. But just as we’re seeing more hurricanes causing more damage each year and we know that it’s because of climate change, we’re probably going to start seeing more accidents and possibly even more terrorism and we will know that it’s because of the rampant deregulation and destabilization that we are seeing right now.
